Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @12:05PM
from the that-is-one-large-hat dept.

Karrde712 writes "Fedora 16 has just been released, bringing with it Gnome 3.2, KDE 4.7, GRUB2 and more!" Here are the full release notes; most users will probably want to jump to the list of changes for desktop users.

i thought fedora releasenames are quite cool. but beefy miracle is just silly. All versions before had a nice sounding codename, and now something that silly. i wonder what they put up next, they need to have a similiarity with the previous one (the beefy miracle) there.

on the rest... yeah, kde on fedora is pretty much okay. other (more minimalistic) WMs of course, too.

Perhaps the problem with GNOME 3 is that GNOME 2 will no longer have the support of the GNOME Foundation behind its continued development, and it might take too long to build up the financial wherewithal to establish a Fork-of-GNOME-2 Foundation.

GNOME 2 has been forked as MATE [github.com] by an Argentinian weeaboo, but it's still in a very early stage without much else than code migration and rebranding going on at the moment. Maybe more contributors will join in and help build a proper infrastructure for the project later, time will tell.

... because it's just UNPOSSIBLE to put whatever desktop environment you want on it.

Given a choice between installing Random Distro X and having to build and install a completely new desktop environment or installing Random Distro Y which is sane out of the box, why would anyone pick the former?

Not sure that takes care of all your requirements, but it gets you at least somewhat there.
Fedora packages a lot of extensions for gnome-shell - I expect that the number and quality of them will only get better and better.

It's undeniably getting there. It will take time, but it's getting there. Take a gander at what Linux Mint did with Gnome3 using extensions. Sure looks like [linuxmint.com] it's gonna work [linuxmint.com] as good as Gome2 to me. Never thought I would be saying this as early as this. I didn't have high expectations at all.

nope, certain gnome dot files will screw up xfce4. you'd have to remove GNOME desktop first, and then delete some dot files in home directory. the truth is that fedora is geared to about two desktops and xfce isn't one

you will have all manner of problems if you still have GNOME and its files around. the proper way would be to uninstall GNOME desktop and erase all the dot files that could fuck xfce up, and there are a few. I tried Fedora as one possibility to fleeing ubuntu, but quite frankly the alternative desktops either aren't as well stocked for serious admin of the machine, or have conflicts

Funny. I have Gnome installed without issue. I will grant you I have never logged into it, so no dot files in my homedir, but otherwise no issue. I use NetworkManager, gnome-bluetooth, and gnome-audio-control (do not like the Xfce applet) in the notification area, so I can't fully uninstall gnome, For some reason I think at least one requires gnome-session, so I can get about as far as removing gnome-session-xsession so it does not show up as an option in LXDM.

Fedora has nearly always been extremely quick (sometimes too much so) to adopt new software and features. It would be shocking if they didn't have Gnome 3. Most of the time, this means Fedora is the most technically advanced major Linux distro. It also makes it one of the buggiest. Don't use it if you don't want to play around with cutting edge new Linux software (versions). Simple as that.

Applefication (The doctrine that designers know better than users, and that users should not worry their tiny little minds about how to configure something to be useful for them) of desktops and applications may be fine for Sheeple, but not for people who want to get the most out of their desktops.
GNOME 3 is a total disaster, it is simply unworkable for people who actually want to do serious work - unless your use of a computer is somewhat trivial and you're happy with what appears to be something that se

GRUB2 is certainly an upgrade for EFI-based systems. I had to download and build my own copy of GRUB2 to run Fedora from an external USB disk on a Mac. (The Bootcamp BIOS emulation thing only allows use of the first internal disk. And it means you're still dealing with BIOS.)

The GRUB2 BIOS systems I'm running seem to behave themselves, but that's only a couple of test VMs.

BIOS boot partition replaces the empty space behind the MBR on MS-DOS labelled partitions, where bootloaders used to expand themselves. You can't use/boot because the BIOS boot partition exists *for the convenience of the bootloader* - i.e. it's part of the bootloader, really, not part of the installed OS. You only need one no matter how many OSes (and/boot partitions) you have.

I hear you, it does feel like a downgrade. On the other hand, grub1 is not working for me. I upgraded to Fedora 16 last night. At first GRUB2 gave me simply "GRUB", and GRUB1 gave me "Error 16". I tried multiple tricks to get GRUB1 working, and was unsuccessful. What I finally ended up having to do was use GRUB and make the empty space at the beginning of the drive 2047 blocks instead of the previous 62. To do this I had to backup the contents of/boot, repartition, redo raid1, format it, and copy the data

Frankly, we rather feel grub2 is something of a downgrade too. Or at least an unnecessary pain in the ass. Fedora isn't going to grub2 because we think it's way better than grub - we don't. Fedora's going to grub2 because it's what upstream supports, and we're tired of having an entire person who does nothing but keep grub-legacy working now upstream doesn't care about it any more.

,,, were it not for Gnome by default. But I've yet to see anything (and it would take a lot, so I'm not expecting it) to overcome their overly short support cycles. I need something better to use this at work, for either the desktops (we only use Windows where there is absolutely no other choice, which makes a grand total of 2) or the servers (0). But even Ubuntu's slow (in some cases) security updates are starting to bother me (over an issue they haven't yet updated in my one-version-behind system even though Slackware fixed the same one over a month ago in versions all the way back to 2007).

Personally I like OpenSUSE. Not quite as fast a release cycle but enough to keep up. Terrific KDE implementation (which is the default) and you can find package repos for nearly anything, and they update issues very rapidly. Just this morning it updated me to Firefox 8, before 8 was even listed on Mozilla's website. I had no idea it was released yet! They're really on top of things and can't wait for their next release next week.

Yeah, because it's REALLY hard to type "yum install kde-desktop" (package spelling might be a bit off on this release, but it's as simple as that) and get a coffee.

Well if you got the DVD (3.7GB - best if you have two or more machines to upgrade) you could just tick the KDE check-box if you want and install both. Of course if you don't want Gnome you can un-tick the Gnome check-box. As for creating a DVD I normally create a boot-able install USB which is very portable, does not scratch and I can reuse it again for the next release or even other things.

Even if you do a DVD/USB install you will still need to type "yum update" (as root of course) or the use the GUI upd

But I've yet to see anything (and it would take a lot, so I'm not expecting it) to overcome their overly short support cycles.

if support cycles are important, then Fedora isn't for you. It's intended to be the latest, cutting-edge software which itself takes so much time and energy to put together that supporting older versions becomes a drain on newer version development. It's essentially Red Hat's public test lab, and one of the reasons that they don't formally support upgrading between distros (especia

It is surprisingly easy to do a fresh installation of Fedora over a previous Fedora (takes about an hour). In fact if you have your file-system laid out properly (ie./boot,/,/usr,/var,/tmp and swap) with separate file-systems for/home and other file-systems such as say/archive or others that are not system related then if you are using LVM you only need to format the system file-systems. Personally I only have two partitions for my system disk the first being/boot and the other an LVM group (in my

Now that there's a continuous repository for CentOS 6, it's a pretty obvious Linux desktop to use in a work environment. It means GNOME 2, Sys V init scripts (i.e. stuff that works!) and updates for 7 years. If you're like me, you'll maintain a handful of packages manually (I have scripts to create RPMs of the latest Firefox and Thunderbird, plus I install the latest LibreOffice too), but with useful repos like EPEL, RPMforge and ELrepo filling in the remaining gaps, it's a pretty stable setup and a much mo

GNOME 3, systemd, autokey, just to name a few. Now they're saying that everything belongs in/usr/bin.

Those who don't understand UNIX are doomed to re-invent it, badly. Evidently, as Fedora.

Maybe I'm just getting too old for this, but I'd rather have improvements in the tools that work than to have to learn a completely new tool every year because somebody decided that the old way is wrong because they didn't invent it. I guess Vim will be on the block next.

If you don't like people moving things around, just be glad you never tried GoboLinux. Personally I quite like it, but you do have to negotiate a completely new system tree. Moving things into/usr/bin is tame in comparison.

I'm not arguing for changing from splitting into/sbin and/bin - I was just mentioning a Linux with far more extreme changes than those that Fedora make, mainly for interest's sake. I've got no issue with keeping/usr/bin,/sbin,/usr/sbin and/usr/local/bin separate, though I must admit it's not something that keeps me awake at night. (Likewise anything under/opt/bin,/opt/local/bin, or any other binary directory you choose to include.)

1. you never had to quickly restore a production DB by shoving the/var disk set into another server haven't you?2. yen never had to painstakingly twiddle a broken server using statically linked/bin/sbin, binaries?

Kids these days, they think all there is to UNIX is a LAMP image on the Cloud...

This is Fedora. When accused of being a testbed for RHEL, their devs respond by claiming that no Fedora is a testbed for much more. Fedora has never claimed to offer a stable desktop system, so I don't know why you'd complain it not providing a stable desktop system.

It will be default when more people trust it. Currently not enough do, I have tried it (some time ago) and at that time it was very slow and failed horrible when the laptop ran out of battery.
Fedora has a history of making us hate stuff becuase they force it upon us before its ready, yum, networkmanager (still not solid, horrible on anything but a laptop), gnome3 (a joke), pulseaudio (awesome now, was not), biosdevname (horay, the nic can now have _any_ name depending on bios so every script referencing e

Fed16 smells a bit too Unity-ish for me. The desktop is being further relegated to nothing more than wallpaper and not a productive space (not storage space mind you!). I feel like at this point the Gnome 2 look and feel is gone with the larger distros. The king is dead; long live the king.
I am giving Mint a try, but their 12.x plans to produce a hybrid Gnome 2 + 3 environment sounds like a clustersmack waiting to happen. Sigh. I think I miss right-clicking for Properties most of all.

I forget what option I turned off in Gnome3 to get my productivity back, but I think it had to do with turning "acceleration" off in preferences. After that you get your icons and menus back, but you're unable to change the theme (its stuck on grey on black)

Since Kermit has been embroiled in some rather obscure licensing issues over the years, from the project's name to the open-source license, I was surprised to see ckermit included in Fedora at all. As it turns out, Columbia University shut down the Kermit project earlier this year. Kermit is now really open-source. http://www.kermitproject.org/ [kermitproject.org]

If you use nvidia drivers with Fedora -- or at very least, do so with the aid of rpmfusion -- you may want to hold off on upgrading to F16.

To see if you should wait, run the following command:

nvidia-settings -q AccelerateTrapezoids

If you get nothing returned (or more accurately, two CRLFs), you will probably want to hold off on upgrading F15 -> F16. Looks like there is a bug in the nvidia drivers which can cause some pretty severe performance degradation.

Thanks for the heads up. I have a box with a 8800GT in it that I plan on upgrading so I may have gotten hit by this too. After getting bitten with Fedora 10 not working with my older ATI-based system I no longer upgrade day 1 in order to avoid stuff like this.

Thanks for the heads up. I put F16 on a VM tonight; Apper doesn't work (hangs on "waiting for service to start") but that may only be in KDE. I purposely didn't install the GNOME 3 DE.
Back to Mint, until SUSE 12.1 on the 16th....

I didn't get the warning in time and upgraded. Turns out I'm affected and hadn't even nailed down the issue until I saw your post. It not HORRIBLE per se, but it is mildly annoying. It manifests itself as a momentary system lock up, kind of like what happens when you run out of RAM and start swapping to disk. It's not continuous, there are periods of heavy occurrance, and of light occurrance.

Should be fixed soon it sounds like. It's tolerable for that period of time.

rpm = really poor package management.
Cloud computing services ? Are they nuts ? Cloud computing is a security nightmare and I shudder to think what bonehead corporations and individuals are willing to sacrifice the privacy of their data to faceless entities.

You don't normally use "rpm" much less "deb" packages as is unless you know what the package dependences are. This is why you use "yum" for managing "rpm" packages and "apt-get" for managing "deb" packages and if you want you can use "alien" to translate between "deb" and "rpm". Of course you can always download the source and try to compile it. if you don't like that then MS Windows will welcome you back with "All is forgiven, just don't do it again" and promptly give you a blue (green if you have Win 8) s

The welcome screen is a big black blob of window, and the interface is no better than Fedora 15. The net benefit is the newer kernel. My first efforts with newer software versions, met with failed to launch, and bugzilla core dumps being forwarded.

Here is an interesting idea for an improvement. In the bottom right corner, allow the gnome 2 desktop switcher to appear. It allows us with one click to move from desktop to desktop with a single click, and allows Gnome3 to please the email/internet users.